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The Daily Vet is a blog featuring veterinarians from all walks of life. Every week they will tackle entertaining, interesting, and sometimes difficult topics in the world of animal medicine – all in the hopes that their unique insights and personal experiences will help you to understand your pets.

Why I Hate the Veterinary Blue Light Special

At least a few of times a week, a prospective client will call our hospital with a few choice questions: How much is an office visit? A spay? Vaccines?

It tends to stop there. The caller typically acts horrified and hangs up in a disgusted huff: "How dare they?!" I can almost hear them say (though I'm on the other side of the room, working on my charts and trying hard not to pay attention to the receptionist's stress).

In case you need to be told (and most of you don't), a veterinary practice is not like a Wal-Mart — we don’t match our competitor’s prices. We each do our own thing in our own way and let you decide whether we're worth it based on the quality of your experience.

"Collusion" is what they call the other approach — the one where all the vet hospitals get together to artificially inflate prices. Somewhere back in the age of the robber barons our society began trying to stop this consumer unfriendly practice (and have been managing with middling success ever since — airlines and software behemoths excepted).

While I believe strongly in a consumer’s right (and responsibility) to make intelligent, informed choices in every aspect of their financial lives, it does grate a bit to have my services disparaged on the basis of price alone — more so when it happens even before the client walks in the door.

Not that I'm referring to you. If you're reading this blog, I can already tell that few of you (if any) found your veterinarian by price shopping and coupon clipping. Most of you were either very fortunate and clicked with the first place you found, relied on the kindness of like-minded friends for referrals, or hopped around a bit until you settled on a great practice. In my opinion, there’s really no other sane way — that is, if you value healthcare.

The worst part of price shopping? It generally doesn’t get you far in terms of finding the least expensive place to take your pets. All vets know about this consumer practice. So as not to scare away potential clients, many vets price their most "shoppable" services low (often well below market prices) and hope the pet owner doesn’t notice the up-charge on everything else. Perhaps by the time they do notice, they’re already madly in love with the practice, or (more likely) their innate human laziness forestalls defection.

A good rule of thumb for price shoppers (lifted from a traditional Cuban saying): You can buy something good, something inexpensive, and something pretty, but try getting all three in one purchase. Sure, sometimes you get lucky, but more often than not, looking at price above all else sacrifices the other two in ways you might not even imagine.

To add a little more confusion, there’s also the problem of believing that paying the most will get you the best. That approach, like price-shopping in reverse, tends to be ineffective as well, in my experience. Whether in Philadelphia, Miami, New York, or Boston (four places I’ve spent significant time with pets), the highest priced emergency, specialty, or general practice was often the place with the best exterior, but not the one with the highest quality services. Unless hampered by a seriously expensive location or a huge investment in extra-fancy equipment, most upstart practices (the ones with hungry, young minds) tend to be the most cost-effective among high quality providers.

I thoroughly dislike price shopping so much, that should I ever own a practice, I’ll be sure to go the way of my current employer and price even my spays, neuters, and vaccines at what I think they’re worth, not at prices designed to "bring ‘em in." God forbid I should have to deal with the penny-pinchers in every aspect of what I do. Smart consumerism is one thing, but pet owners looking to challenge my prices across the board? That’s quite another … they’ll just have to go elsewhere (I hope).